Not everyone buys a new phone frequently, and not everyone can or will spend $200 on a smartphone without a second thought, especially at the global scale.

Smartphones are getting better and hopefully this problem will be irrelevant in a few years, but I still know plenty of people for whom it's still very real at the moment.

Sure, I was part of a startup designing apps for emerging markets and I understand the restrictions but I think these restrictions changed somewhat for phones bought from 2018 on. I just returned from 2 weeks in India and it was common to see people in the streets with ~$200 phones

Sub $100 phones rule the streets here in Nigeria. In those cases storage is very precious and limited.

The flip side is that people who can only afford sub $100 phones are not as valuable targets to develop apps for.